Bret Harte’s habits were regular and simple. He smoked a good deal, drank very little, and took exercise every day. At one time he played golf, and at another he was somewhat interested in amateur photography. But his real recreation, as well as his labor, was found in that imaginary world which sprang to life under his pen. He was often a guest at English country houses, and was familiar with the history of English cathedrals, abbeys, churches, and historical ruins. He made a pilgrimage to Macbeth’s country in Scotland and to Charlotte Brontë’s home in Yorkshire. He loved Byron’s poetry, and was once a guest at Newstead Abbey. He frequently visited Lord Compton, later Marquis of Northampton, at Compton Wyngates in Warwickshire near the battleground of Edgehill, and at Castle Ashby at Northampton. Reminiscences of these visits may be found in The Desborough Connections and The Ghosts of Stukeley Castle. He belonged to various clubs, such as The Beefsteak, The Rabelais, The Kinsmen; but during the last few years of his life he frequented only the Royal Thames Yacht Club.
“This selection seemed to me so odd,” writes Mr. Pemberton, “for he had no love of yachting, that I questioned him concerning it. ‘Why, my dear fellow,’ he said, ‘don’t you see? I never use a club until I am tired of my work and want relief from it. If I go to a literary club I am asked all sorts of questions as to what I am doing, and my views on somebody’s last book, and to these I am expected to reply at length. Now my good friends in Albemarle Street talk of their yachts, don’t want my advice about them, are good enough to let me listen, and I come away refreshed by their conversation.’”[103]
So Hawthorne, it will be remembered, cared little for the meetings of the Saturday Club in Boston, and was often an absentee, but he delighted in the company of the Yankee sea-captains at Mrs. Blodgett’s boarding-house in Liverpool. “Captain Johnson,” he wrote, “assigned as a reason for not boarding at this house that the conversation made him sea-sick; and indeed the smell of tar and bilge-water is somewhat strongly perceptible in it.”
The truth is that an aversion to the society of purely literary men should naturally be looked for in writers of a profound or original stamp of mind. Something may be learned and some refreshment of spirit may be obtained from almost any man who knows almost anything at first hand,—even from a market-gardener or a machinist; and if his subject is what might be called a natural one, such as ships, horses or cows, it is bound to have a certain intellectual interest. But the ordinary, clever, sophisticated littérateur is mainly occupied neither with things nor with ideas, but with forms of expression, and consequently he is a long way removed from reality. It may be doubted if any society in the world is less profitable than his.
Mr. Moncure Conway, in his autobiography, gives an amusing reminiscence of Bret Harte’s proneness to escape from what are known as “social duties.” Mrs. Conway “received” on Monday afternoons, and Bret Harte had told her that he would be present on a particular Monday, but he failed to appear,—much to the regret of some persons who had been invited for the occasion. “When chancing to meet him,” writes Mr. Conway, “I alluded to the disappointment; he asked forgiveness and said, ‘I will come next Monday—even though I promise.’”
He had a constant dread that his friendship or acquaintance would be sought on account of his writings, rather than for himself. A lady who sat next to him at dinner without learning his name, afterward remarked, “I have always longed to meet him, and I would have been so different had I only known who my neighbor was.” This, unfortunately, being repeated to Bret Harte, he exclaimed, “Now, why can’t a woman realize that this sort of thing is insulting?... If Mrs. —— talked with me, and found me uninteresting as a man, how could she expect to find me interesting because I was an author?”
During the last ten or fifteen years of his life, Bret Harte seldom went far from home. He never visited Switzerland until September, 1895, and even then he carried his manuscript with him, and devoted to it part of each day. He took great delight in the Swiss mountains, often spoke of his vacation there, and was planning to go again during the summer of his death.
From Lucerne he wrote to a friend[104] as follows: “Strangest of all, I find my heart going back to the old Sierras whenever I get over three thousand feet of Swiss altitude, and—dare I whisper it?—in spite of their pictorial composition, I wouldn’t give a mile of the dear old Sierras, with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for one hundred thousand kilometres of the picturesque Vaud.”
Of Geneva he wrote to the same correspondent: “I thought I should not like Geneva, fancying it a kind of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau, and the De Staëls and Mme. de Warens still lingered there.”
But he did like Geneva; and of the lake, as he viewed it from his hotel window, he wrote, “Ask him if he ever saw an expanse of thirty miles of water exactly the color of the inner shell of a Mother-of-Pearl oyster.”